Down the Yukon River but up the Teslin, steamboats like the SS Nisutlin carried the soldiers and equipment of the 340th Engineers to their starting point at Teslin and Morley Bay deep in the interior of Yukon Territory. General Hoge had ordered the 340th to build highway from there through into the mountains of British …
Tag Archives: Skagway
The 18th, Pride of the Alcan Project
The 18th Combat Engineers, a crack outfit, came early to the Alaska Highway project. They came up the Inland Passage to Skagway, boarded the WP&YR and invaded Whitehorse in April. Their heavy equipment came up from Skagway in May. The only bright spot in General Hoge’s firmament, the 18th immediately headed north out of Whitehorse, …
Gateways to the Alcan
Gateways… The Alaska Highway that General Hoge and the Corps proposed to build in 1942 would traverse some of the most remote mountains and forests on earth. And if men traverse the North Country on primordial paths, they access those paths through equally primordial gateways. Of the seven regiments that Hoge launched into the North …
Harriet Pullen, Queen of Skagway
Harriet Pullen, one of the ladies who joined a flood of men in their rush for Klondike gold, found her fame and fortune in Skagway, Alaska. She had no need to go on to the Klondike. “I only had seven dollars to my name. I didn’t know a soul in Alaska. I had no place …
Do You See It?
“Do you see it?” An exasperated black soldier dropped his pants. A few residents of Skagway, checking the credibility of some white officer, had asked if black soldiers had tails. White residents of Skagway didn’t know quite what to make of the Army’s segregationist policy. They reacted to the black soldiers with curiosity—cautious curiosity. Link …
Like Dirt in Front of a Dozer Blade
Like dirt in front of a dozer blade, the problems that plagued the Alaska Highway Project piled high in May and the hell-bent advance into the wilderness threatened to dissolve in chaos and confusion. Three entry points, Skagway, Valdez and Dawson Creek, swarmed with confused troops trying desperately to get organized. Getting equipment to the …
Racism
Racism, not simply wrong but also incredibly inefficient, visited the commander of the Alaska Highway Project, General William Hoge on a regular basis, but never as dramatically as when he put together his plan to get two of his regiments out of Skagway and onto the Highway. Link to another story about Hoge After much …
Soapy Smith
Soapy Smith came to Skagway to get rich—like everybody else in the Gold Rush years. But Jefferson Randolph Smith had no intention of mining gold. Soapy came to mine miners. Link to another story “Fascinating Skagway” A confidence man up from Georgia, dressing and presenting like a southern gentleman, Soapy took his name from one …
Lieutenants
Lieutenants? Where would the army be without them? In June 1942 Lt. Darrel M. Schumacher of the 340th Engineering Regiment cooled his heels in Skagway. He and his men would walk to the Teslin River as soon as the 93rd built them a trail. In the meantime, they waited. Then the Japanese bombed the American …
Motor Pool
Motor Pool–the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers needed one desperately. And locating one and getting heavy equipment to it presented a problem. In May 1942 the black soldiers of the 93rd Engineers plunged through Yukon’s forbidding wilderness working with a couple of borrowed bulldozers and hand tools. But Ships carrying their heavy equipment steamed out …